ponderman

Thank you, Christine. The word “tooltip” did the trick – there are plugins that come close to doing what I want. I will look at various plugins and scour the net now that I have a way to get started. Thank you very much. I will mark this as resolved.

Mike – You were entirely correct, although I initially went about it in a wrong way by copying the entire function.php from the 2010 theme into my child directory and then modified the image settings. That created a host of other conflicts until I learned how to do it properly. I created an empty functions.php in my child directory and then copy/pasted only the clearly commented section related to header mods into that file and then set both, Height and width to zero.

The function.php in the child directory is READ FIRST, so whatever I declare there takes precedence over what exists in the default theme function.php. Basically one has to be very thoughtful about what NEEDS to be in the child’s function.php, and nothing else. Thanks again. Mike

deactivating plugin did not help. The same error msg appeared in the admin panel.

Switsched to default theme – the above error had disappeared, but I received a new error msg:

has_post_thumbnail() in /home/newshore/public_html/wp-content/themes/twentyten/header.php on line 71

this is entirely new. I suspect that this error is due to having installed the menubar plugin which required an entry in the header. With that plugin removed – this is the likely reason.

But now I have something to work with. If I flush it out, I will make a note of it here. But your comments certainly added a ray of hope —– Many thanks

Thanks, esmi – and I can see your point for ‘vertical drop-down only’ situations, though I wonder how often relatively extreme drop-down breakouts are encountered. For situations that list pages (or posts) of parents that extend laterally when hovering over a parent item, color or small lateral offsets would certainly be helpful to all but very large pages or posts.

I will try using smaller fonts and perhaps also split longer tags so that the tabs shrink horizontally and can accommodate deeper hierarchies before being lost so quickly to the display margins. Not sure how to do that, but will give it a try. I appreciate your comment here and all your inputs in this forum

Excess blue background above the new 760×130 image was solved by removing the color as recommended by whooami and by changing the height in #headerimg from 192 to 122, i.e. by retaining the 8 pixel reduction (from 200 height to 192), i.e. the 130 height was reduced here to 122.